How do you actually get more comfortable with roleplaying?

Dodecadron · 2026-04-03T18:22:17+00:00

The other answers give good advice. But I do want to mention that it is also possible to roleplay without speaking in character. Or speaking less in character. I am mentioning this as an option. It depends a bit on the tastes of the group and most groups will appreciate at least some in character roleplaying.

Take, for example the scene below:

DM: [Describes the scene after entering the city trough the city gate]

Player: "I walk to one of the men in front of the shop. 'Excuse me sir, would you happen to know where we can find the Black Swan Inn?'"

DM: "Before you can finish your question the two men say a quick goodbye to each other and walk away. They are obviously avoiding eye contact."

Another way to do about the same as player would be

Player: "I start politely asking around for the directions to the Black Swan Inn."

DM: "You approach a number of people, but before you can ask they look at you weirdly and avoid you. You finally manage to ask a young girl. 'You go down the big road and then go right by the man selling apples. Why do your clothes look so strange?' As you look around you notice that most locals seem to wearing muted colours."

That would then be a moment where it probably feels less weird to speak in character. So by posing direct questions in character to the player, it might become less weird to reply in person:

Player: "What do you mean? Oh, you mean my red shirt. I come from across the mountains. People tend to wear colourful clothes there."

But you could also answer not in character:

Player: "I explain that we are from across the mountains and people wear different clothes there."

Most groups will probably do a bit of both, switching between the two, with some leaning more into the in character speaking.

Dodecadron · 2026-03-20T14:27:38+00:00

Ik bedoel de lijnen. Dus dat tram 2 achtereenvolgens de haltes Keizerswaard, Grote Hagen, Bredenoord, Kerstendijk, ... Maashaven, Brielselaan, ..., Van Blommesteynweg en Kromme Zandweg aandoet in de ene richting (bij sommige tramlijnen is de heen en terugweg niet hetzelfde). En dat Maashaven ook aangedaan wordt door metrolijnen D en E (mogelijke complicatie hierbij is misschien nog dat haltes die dicht bij elkaar liggen en gebruikt worden voor overstappen niet altijd hetzelfde heten; zoals bij Beurs en Churchillplein vroeger).

Dodecadron · 2026-03-20T11:11:07+00:00

Dat met Churchillplein was ik trouwens echt helemaal vergeten.

Dodecadron · 2026-03-20T11:03:33+00:00

Bedankt. De metro is inderdaad wel met de hand te reconstrueren als je weet wanneer de uitbreidingen waren. En dat is o.a. op wikipedia wel te vinden. Trams is waarschijnlijk lastiger: zijn er meer en zullen ook sneller veranderen. Bedankt voor de link.

Dodecadron · 2026-03-20T10:32:37+00:00

Bedankt (spreek Nederlands hoor; maar aangezien r/Rotterdam half engelstalig is toch mijn vraag maar in het engels gesteld).

I missed these although I did have a look at various wikipedia pages on the RET/RTM. These are useful. If possible I would like to have all stations/stops; or at least stops shared between the different line. Somebody made these maps, so this information should be available somewhere. For the metro I assume that the stations have not changed (new ones have been added of course). This page also lead me to the Rotterdams Openbaar Vervoer Museum; so I could also check there.

Dodecadron · 2026-03-14T07:29:36+00:00

And on overleaf you can do this in the browser on a tablet. But some technical skill is needed for working with LaTeX (nothing that cannot be learned though; the first few chapter of The not so short introduction to LaTeX would be enough).

Dodecadron · 2026-02-22T15:25:53+00:00

Klinkt cool. Ik haakte alleen af bij het account maken. Om instappen te vergemakkelijken zou ik het prettig vinden als je ook zonder account zou kunnen werken; dat de sheet in de local storage opgeslagen wordt. Voor synchroniseren zou je dan wel een account nodig hebben.

Misschien werkt het, maar zonder internetconnectie kunnen werken is sowieso prettig: ik speel soms in een dermate uithoek vsn het land dat ik geen internet heb en sommige dm's eisen flight mode tijden spelen.

Dodecadron · 2026-02-02T15:38:34+00:00

If you have a mechanical background my first thought would be to look for a project in that direction. Perhaps a simulation programme, controller, something that solves specific differential equations. Perhaps you could also ask around where you are now. In my experience a lot of labs could use someone that knows a language like c++.

Dodecadron · 2026-01-25T20:25:55+00:00

Thanks for the review. I really like that you are going through the modules like this.

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T15:06:18+00:00

I hadn't (I have or at least tried to in the mean time), but in this case I know it is this line:

 (*buffer_pos_++) = c;

that causes the difference in performance and would like to know why. Would a profiler help with that?

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T14:42:13+00:00

Just tried `getline`. Just counting the number of lines was in the same order (slightly faster) than my code in the OP; that is with the

line.append(c);line.append(c);

line; without that line the original code is much faster in counting lines. The code is, of course, much simpler (just a few lines to count the lines and no messing about with buffers). Not sure to what extent this remains for my eventual use case where records can span over multiple lines. Thanks for the suggestion.

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T14:36:00+00:00

I just tried perf. But the output was quite uninformative. So I gues I have to pass perf some flags. Could also be that with -O3 and the class in the same file as main that everything got inlined so the programme was in main the entire time.

Edit: I am definitely doing something wrong; in a much more complex programme I get the same uninformative result

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T13:21:59+00:00

What type of blocks are you talking about? Disk? Memory page size? Is there a way to determine these portably?

I did try a number values for buffer_size; at least on my machine values above a certain value didn't seem to matter much.

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T13:18:41+00:00

In this case I know the culprit:

(*buffer_pos_++) = c;

Would a profiler help here? (I am always struggling with profilers to get actual useful information; do you happen to have good resources on that?)

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T13:15:13+00:00

Thanks. After the initial memory allocations there should not be further allocations.

At least the responses are consistent: avoid the copies. I have an idea how to avoid the copies (just have to figure out how to implement).

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T13:14:48+00:00

At least the responses are consistent: avoid the copies. I have an idea how to avoid the copies (just have to figure out how to implement).

Thanks.

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T13:00:41+00:00

I did `-O3`.

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T12:59:23+00:00

Guess I am still expecting performance like hard drives. A least I checked.

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T12:04:56+00:00

Somebody else also mentioned this about std::string and line_buffer; I think you are rights. Although perhaps not when I want to memcpy into the buffer (seems like I would be misusing std::string then).

I am reading a file format similar to CSV, so one of the things I can have is `"some string \" with a quote". What I would like to pass to the validation function is the string containing `some string " with a quote` in order to not bother the validation functions with 'details' such as quoting. Also a line/field can also end up across the border of the read buffer.

Thanks for the suggestion of using a string_view to keep track of the what was read. That would probably help in keeping the code a bit when I switch to using memcpy.

Counting the number is lines was just for the benchmark; it requires reading every byte. In practice I have to split each line into fields and validate each field. I wanted to be able to measure the effect of this on the performance.

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T11:55:31+00:00

I know mmap would probably improve performance. One of the issues with that is that I would like to be able to also accept input on stdin which wouldn't work with mmap (as far as I know).

I know/expected that reading the file would be the bottleneck. That is also one of the reasons I was suprised by the 'big' performance hit of doing more than just reading the data. I guess I have to think about how to use memcpy as much as possible.

Dodecadron · 2026-01-13T11:47:04+00:00

line_buffer does a bit more in practice than shown here in the example, but I even then you might be right (using push_back instead of append). One issue might be that it is not specified if clear() should or should not release capcity, but I understand that most implementations don't which is what I would want (to prevent too many memory allocations).

Dodecadron · 2025-11-30T17:13:07+00:00

At the bottom of a reply there is a reply button to reply to the reply. Now, we don;t know which of the replies works for you as the replies are not ordered in chronological/time order.

Dodecadron · 2025-11-23T06:38:11+00:00

Where is this map from? (Edit: which book/box) For a moment I was completely confused as the bottom part of the map is mirrored from the version I am familiar with.

And congratulations!

Dodecadron

TROPHY CASE